Jeanne Crain’s ascent to movie stardom in the 1940s had all the earmarks of the classic local-girl-becomes-Hollywood-star story. Her parents, George Crain and Loretta Carr, met while he was a small-town high school principal in Ray, North Dakota, in the early 1920s. They married in 1924 and decided to move west in search of a wider variety of employment opportunities.
George got a job as a high school English teacher in the California high desert town of Barstow. Jeanne Elizabeth Crain was the couple’s first child, born in Barstow on May 25, 1925. When her father landed a new teaching post at Inglewood High School, the couple moved to a small house on Buckthorne Avenue in that city.
Jeanne’s sister, Rita, was born in the city in 1927. Loretta’s family, the Carrs, had also moved to California, buying a house on Van Ness Avenue on Inglewood’s eastern border. It was fortuitous for Loretta and her daughters that they did, as her marriage to George ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1932, and the women of the family moved in with the Carrs.
Jeanne’s primary school years were spent happily at St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic all-girls school then located at Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, just north of Inglewood. In the eighth-grade, one of the nuns encouraged Jeanne to audition for “Scarface,” the school play about an Indian maiden.
She surprised herself by winning the lead role, and discovered that she enjoyed playing someone else besides her.